Google responds to Siri with Majel?

When Apple released the iPhone 4S earlier this year, Siri generated a lot of attention and received rave reviews due to its ability to understand natural speech commands. While Android users already had voice capabilities in their phones, it couldn’t work like Siri did due to its inability to understand natural language. Well, it looks like Google has got an answer to Siri up its sleeve, in the form of a voice assistant codenamed Majel (the voice of the Federation Computer from Star Trek).

According to the folks over at Android and Me who claimed to have received some information about the secret project, it will be an evolution of Google’s Voice Actions with the addition of natural language processing, essentially letting it function like Siri. Majel is also said to be released sometime this year, but with almost half of December gone, a January or February release date will seem more likely.

Nothing’s confirmed or official at the moment, so take this rumor with a pinch of salt, but seeing how much buzz Siri got, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google did upgrade Voice Actions to compete with it. In the meantime we’ll just have to continue speaking unnaturally to our Android devices to get things done with our voices.